What We Are
by Jessi Noan
Summary: AU The Americans would have arrived eventually. Sequel to 'It's All the Same Anyway'. Please read warnings before reading the story.
1. Prologue

**Title**: What We Are

**Fandom**: _28 Days/Weeks Later_

**Pairings**: implied Henry/Jim, one-sided Jim/Selena

**Warnings**: AU, character death, implied entrapment and sexual abuse/rape, self-harm, strong language, violence, generally dark

**Genre**: Angst/Drama

**Rating**: R or M

**Feedback**: Appreciated but not necessary.

**Notes**: I've decided to continue this story. The more I thought about it, the more I realized there was more to tell. The prologue is a lightly edited repost of _Coal Black Eyes_, which has been taken down. From here on out, the notes will be significantly reduced, unless I feel the need to clarify something. I'll be weaving this into the _28 Weeks Later_ narrative, but I'll be altering a few things that bothered me about the movie. Also worth noting: I do not own or claim any ownership of the _28 Days Later_ franchise or any of the established characters within the series. The many American soldiers I will undoubtedly pull out of thin air when none of the established soldiers in _28 Weeks Later_ fit are necessary evils and I'll try to use them sparingly.

--

_Cowardice is always tainted with raging disappointment. What we could have been is forever unavailable because of what we are._

--

**Prologue**

Jim's mother used to tell him, in that sweet way she had whenever he scuffed a knee or got rejected by a girl or didn't get that job he thought he really wanted, that any situation could be coped with if he kept some sense of perspective. She wouldn't say it the same way, not in those words, certainly not when he was a child, but the message would be the same. She'd see her son's face, fallen hard into the longings and frowns of an older man and tell him, her words neatly wrapped in a hug and kiss, it could be worse, that it often was so much worse and that he would survive this minor setback the way he always had. He'd be stronger for it, she'd tell him. He'd be better.

Jim didn't think about his mother much anymore, or his father, not since he found their poisoned, decaying bodies cradled together in the bedroom they'd shared since before Jim was more than a wonderful idea. He realized when he was with Selena, after death and blood and pounding through the darkness towards some fleeting hope of safety, how real survival, not the bruised elbows and egos of ordinary life, but the actual running, fighting, fleeing churn of existence disallowed reflection and grief.

It demanded action.

It demanded sacrifice.

Each day beat on in their flight from death, from rage and loss - a more personal and profound loss than that of family – and found Jim walling off the people he knew from before, those that made up the piles of the long dead and Infected. He had a different life, severed from the burning limb of memory and hurt, one completely separate from whom he had been and those he had loved. He existed in the now, with the woman who saved him time and time again, who he felt more for than he could ever remember having felt about anyone or thing; he existed with two strangers who holed themselves up in an apartment building and became his new family, two more people he would rip a metal pipe off a building and bludgeon a pack of Infect for if it meant he could save their lives. What he felt before paled to what he felt now: the steel-hard attachments that he forged under the strain of mutual circumstance could no more compare to the tamer feelings of affection and love than the sun could to an ant.

Once, before Frank and before West and his military guard, before it all got so fucked up, once, he'd been able to stop and breathe. Together, the fear sucked out of the air for the first time since he'd awoken in the abandoned hospital in the middle of dead London, he and Selena talked. They talked about hope and safety and trust, with no more words than were necessary in the last peaceful moment either of them would know. They didn't talk about their lives from before; they simply looked at Frank and Hannah and knew that the two of them brought what was so desperately needed in their desperate times.

Even then, in that half moment between driving and sleeping, he couldn't mourn his loss, wasn't capable of it. It was impossible to mourn for just his parents as his parents were now with the before and had become part of the idea, forever distanced. If he was to grieve, he would have to grieve the life that none of them could lead. No matter how they survived – the _if_ threatening to emerge but never allowed more than a shadow – and what life would be like in the after - after Infection, after they found a safe harbor to wait out the storm, after someone saved them - nothing could ever be _normal_. Nothing would ever be like _before_. Jim knew, like he knew he would kiss Selena if he wasn't afraid he'd have to kill her and then couldn't, that every personal tragedy became epic when set against the background of their hunted survival. Jim knew his personal pains were the same as everyone's and his grief would carry the far greater burden of knowing he wasn't special, that he was part of a handful of survivors who had lost everything.

He wasn't capable of carrying their weight either.

So he slept and dreamt and knew he'd been right, the moment couldn't last, not even the retreat into his mind.

--

Jim did compare the old now and the new now. There was no longer a before or an after: his before was safely tucked away, unable to be touched even in comfort. It was his pipe dream: too unbelievable to be true and best not remembered as it would tear more wounds than it could salve. His after suffered the destruction of failure, of hopelessness, of knowing there would be none. But his guilt and misery would not let him escape his destroying the old now and single-handedly creating the now he suffered every day. His thinking was reserved for self-recrimination and hatred and his thoughts spun him around: if only he could have done better, saved them all, taken his chances and stood up to Henry, figured out a way to escape and freed them, but it didn't matter, it never would matter, because Selena had died, was gone, the strong, brave woman that he never kissed because he thought he'd have to kill her and he didn't have to, but he did and nothing mattered anymore. Nothing could make the world okay again. If only he could have done better.

Jim knew better. Jim remembered.

He remembered the when, how and where clearly and they padded his guilt with the concrete evidence of his fault. The day Selena died, the day Major West had walked into their shared room and, defying the dry heaving and the telltale tautness of Jim's body, had grabbed Jim into his arms and held onto him until he couldn't fight anymore. West, with real sorrow in his voice, not born of compassion or love or remorse, but the simple fact that he was sorry he had to deliver the news, told Jim frankly, not without kindness but with the clinical formality a man in his position had grown accustom to using, that Selena was dead. That she'd been getting weaker and had isolated herself and her body had just given up and no one was to blame, not really, she would have died sooner if they hadn't stayed or worse, she could have been Infected, and West had done all he could reasonably do, given the circumstances. Selena was dead.

Selena was dead.

Jim felt the snap of all the hope he hadn't known he still carried breaking free and retreating into the air. Jim's new now, a Hell he hadn't considered possible, consumed him as his misery blotted out every sound, every movement, every image for the week after, a span he could only define because Henry told him later.

--

Looking into the coal black eyes, filled with shock and horror, Jim thought finally of his mother, of perspective, of seeing from outside his own eyes more than the slow decay of his sanity and body. He looked into the eyes of the unknown military man and saw himself reflected back: hollow, dirty, semen dried to the backs of his thighs and ass, nails ragged and chewed on, hair shaggy, wild. Already squatting by the bed, he saw who he was with a sudden clarity that snapped his head back and pushed him hard against the age-worn, soggy nightstand and into the ragged, mildew blanket that followed him off the bed.

"Oh God," the soldier breathed. His accent, not heard since press releases and adverts of before, caught Jim so soundly that he flinched and curled harder into himself. "Oh fuck. Shit, Gonzalez, I've found an unarmed white male, age twenty-five to thirty-five, in need of immediate medical attention on second floor just off main staircase. Does not appear to be Infected. I repeat, medic needed to the second floor immediately."

Of course, he'd heard the noise. He'd heard the exchange of fire, telling him it couldn't be the Infected, unless the Infected had learned how to fire semi-automatics. He'd heard the shouts and a mine detonate and felt the base of the house shake. But from his place in Henry's small, well-protected area of the compound, out of the range of regular bullets, Jim didn't much care. If he was to be completely honest, he thought he was imagining it, as he had before with the sound of planes; he always repressed the sound, wanting to hold onto what was left of himself, if only because giving into it would be giving himself a way out of his completely deserved purgatory. But this, the vividness, the close and total reality of it caused Jim to accept that his mind had finally pulled itself apart and that he'd officially entered into a lucid dream state where he would live out the rest of his days. Not that he cared much about living, not that he thought he deserved to – he just kept waking up and had accepted that too.

So Jim stayed on the floor, the rotting compound creaking and sighing itself closer to the foundation, and waited for the moment to pass, if it was meant to.

"Copy that. The medical team is following behind; ETA five minutes."

"God dammit!" This voice, Jim only heard, crawling into himself as he was. "What the fuck is wrong with these people?"

"We don't know what it was like to live like this, Edwards," came the baritone voice of his flanking colleague. "Calm down."

"How can I calm down? This is fucked up. First the girl, then him and those fucks were shooting at us and we thought they'd all gone fucking nuts and it turns out they had, just not the way we thought. This is so fucked up. This is so fucked up."

"Edwards!" Jim heard the familiar sound of precision-sharp footsteps coming closer and the bunching of fabric, expecting to be knocked out of this nightmare by the realer one of Henry's hands and hating that he desperately wanted to be. Instead, he heard the dark-eyed man grunt as his partner shook him once by the material at his collarbone and continued gruffly, "you need to focus. Your being pissed off is not going to make this go any easier on us or him, so save it for the Captain, 'cause I don't wanna hear it. And I swear to God, if you utter one more word about this shit before the medic gets here…" The threat ended with another rough shake and the release of the man, followed immediately by the slap of gunmetal against the skin of the baritone's palm.

In all of this, Jim just dug his fingers harder and further into his scalp, willing it – the men, these accented voices, all the sounds that were so familiar yet unfamiliar - to all go away, not feeling the distant pain of tearing skin or the blood bunching at his finger tips and sliding down his neck. He faintly heard the dark-eyed man – Edwards? – start to say, "Hey, don't-" before his partner jerked him back and told him to wait for the medic. Jim didn't care. Jim would rather they disappeared.

Silence descended between the two men as they listened to Jim's shallow, panicked breathing and the frequent announcements of "clear" sounding over the headsets and Edwards waited for the help he knew was far too long in coming.


	2. Chapter 1

Note: I will try to post a new chapter once a week, on either Saturday or Sunday. Now that I've said that, I've pretty much doomed myself. On the plus side, I have the first part of chapter two written and the rest outlined. Also, I'll be editing the prologue's general information when new warnings, pairings or the like arise. I'll be noting the changes as well in notes, just for clarity's sake.

--

**Chapter One**

Scarlet was not having a good day. It had to be allowed though that Scarlet didn't seem to have many good days. The most that could be said, really, was that Scarlet was at least not having a bad day.

That's what she'd thought, anyway. It had remained a not good day all through the exchange of fire that delayed the arrival of the medical transport, during the confirmation of two unarmed prisoners in dire need of medical attention, and inexplicably while trying to decipher the baffled ramblings of Edwards as he met her at the foot of the stairs north of the entryway. The most she gathered between all the explosions of "fuck," "shit" and "God dammit" was that he very passionately felt she should check the male civilian first. Knowing the situation only as a detached fact voiced through the radio, Scarlet was most concerned with the state of the young female captive and brushed Edwards off for the time being, directing a subordinate medic to follow him back up the stairs, while she followed her own escort down a hallway in the opposite direction.

"It's as bad as you think," Murphy monotoned softly as Scarlet stepped into the kitchen where they'd found and detained the girl. "On the plus side, she's lucid, which is more than I would have expected."

"I wish I could say that's a plus, but I won't know until I talk to her," she replied, matching his tone, before approaching the young woman huddled on the floor next to the cooking island. She moved steadily, watching the girl as the girl watched her, and knelt down beside her with a reassuring smile when she was certain the girl wouldn't run or lash out.

As Scarlet considered how to best approach the situation, taking into account the likelihood that any rough or sudden touch would trigger traumatic memories and responses, she felt her estimation of the day move down from not good to damn near bad. The wary, but vaguely curious look the young woman was giving her made the mark hover just above bad and she had to agree that the lucidity was a positive sign.

Deciding on a personal approach over the clinical, Scarlet smiled softly and carefully touched the top of the girl's hand. "My name is Scarlet. I'm a doctor. I'm here to help you." The woman shifted her hand away, but moved no further and continued to observe Scarlet. "What's your name?"

The girl pursed her lips, frowning slightly, and stayed quiet. For the sake of staying optimistic, Scarlet decided to take the guarded response as reasonable and mentally noted it as another good sign. Besides, while a name would be nice, it wasn't strictly necessary.

"That's okay. You can tell me your name when you're ready. Right now, we're going to take you out of here, but I need to know if you're able to move without aggravating an injury or if you need a particular kind of assistance, like a wheelchair. Are you okay to move on your own?" At the mention of leaving, the girl took on a wild, hopeful look and nodded frantically when Scarlet stopped talking, immediately attempting to push herself up. Scarlet thought briefly of restraining her so she could check the girl's viability herself, but decided from the woman's response that removing her from this dungeon would likely be more helpful in the long run; instead, she assisted the woman in gaining her balance while signaling Murphy away from the doorway so they could pass through without him invading her space.

The two women struggled through the labyrinth of hallways that made up the servants' section of the old building alone, the girl limping and Scarlet supporting her with a hand gripping the young woman's upper arm and the other holding her forearm. Murphy and Scarlet's armed escort followed them after a minute, in a state of hyper-awareness regarding the woman's condition. Knowing they could be mistaken for sexual predators at any time and could, in all probability, send the girl into some sort of trauma fit had them maintaining an almost laughable distance between them and the women.

"Slow down a little." The woman frowned hard in Scarlet's direction, but decreased her shaky pace to a less unsteady wobble. Before much longer, they reached the entryway and, after a moment's hesitation on the woman's part, moved into the daylight.

The early autumn light caused the girl to wince, but she pushed forward at her body's involuntary withdrawal. Scarlet couldn't begin to imagine how long it had been since she'd been outside. Her skin had a yellow cast to it and the unsteadiness had more to do with bad nutrition than overt injuries. She was the only female medic on this mission, and as such, would have to be the one to more thoroughly check the woman before they departed, but she was also the lead for the medical unit and knew she'd have to leave the survivor in order to access the man.

Of the thirty-five members that made up the unit deployed for this particular scouting mission, Scarlet was familiar with all of them. She had worked closely with almost every level of the chain of command sent from America to reestablish civilization on the infected island and because of that, she knew there were three women soldiers present, two of whom were at the mansion due to having been in the action of the morning. She made a point of leaving the newly freed woman under their likely less threatening supervision, a male medic hovering impotently nearby as if afraid to approach her, while Scarlet returned to the house and went north to the stairs.

What greeted her at the second floor doorway were a livid Gonzalez, an aggravated Edwards and her harried junior medic who, since he had observed the male detainee, wanted to hand the case off to her as soon as possible.

"He's completely out of it! I think he's had a break from reality!"

"Wouldn't you have one too, if you were in his position!?"

"Shut _UP_, Edwards! I'm sick of listening to this bleeding heart crap."

Scarlet pushed through them, took one look at the naked, nearly-catatonic man whose fingers appeared to be sinking into his scalp of their own volition, and felt her not good day plummet into 'worst day in the history of her life' territory.

--

Despite assurances of a threat being neutralized, no military man feels at ease on an open road surrounded by trees and as such, would not willingly stop there for any amount of time, let alone just after a fire fight with what was supposed to be an allied nation's armed guard. It was unfortunate for the soldiers at hand, then, that they had the less than glamorous duty of waiting next to a pile of rotting corpses for the field medics to return from the mansion. There were vague intentions of carefully searching each body for identification, but no one at the site found anything at all plausible in the idea.

Adrenaline still spiked from the unexpected (but hardly surprising) fight, the eight-person patrol guard remained alert, nervy and as a whole, attempted to belie their ill ease with idle conversation.

"What the fuck is this, man? Were they just too fucking busy to bury their dead?"

"Looks like their body dump. Christ, most these bodies are falling apart. Probably all infected. Shit, they starved to death what? Six, seven months ago?"

Another voice spoke up in implicit agreement. "The bottom of that mess has got to be mush or like chunky soup or something."

"That's called stew, jackass."

Ignoring the side comment of, "no, it's not," the soldier continued his thought. "Whatever. I'm just sayin', we should just torch the whole pile and be done with it. Save us a lot of time and paperwork. Won't get a single fucking ID off 'em anyway."

"Maybe they're going to remove all the jaws and use dental records. We'll be escorting a truck full of mouths back to merry ol' Lawn-Dawn."

"That's fuckin' disgusting, man. You're going to make me puke."

Emboldened, the soldier pressed on. "Just imagine, at least a hundred disembodied jaws chattering along with us all the way back to base." _Snap, snap_, he clicked his teeth together.

"Shit, naw, not that. I was talkin' 'bout that sorry excuse for an accent. Have you even heard an English person talk before?"

"What the fuck does it matter? They're pretty much extinct now, so no one can say what they fucking sounded like."

"You'd be right, if it weren't for all the movies and shit."

Separated from the conversation by natural temperament and little more than a few feet in distance, Guerin listened to the members of his patrol unit with growing trepidation. Part of him - the logical, rational part - knew they were shaking out their nerves, but another part of him couldn't stop from wondering if he would turn into this type of person, if he too would someday look at death and find nothing worth respecting or honoring. Without averting his eyes from the tree line, Private Guerin stepped closer to his commander and asked in an undertone, "do you think we're assholes?"

Staff Sergeant Hughes glanced at Guerin from the corner of his eye and seemed to shrug with his eyebrows while never actually having to move his face. "Probably. You'd have to be, a little, to do this job." Guerin couldn't stop himself from frowning at the response and Hughes felt obligated to clarify, if only because he had no desire to deal with a distracted, morally-conflicted soldier when on duty. "We're still good people. What we do, we do so other people don't have to. There's always going to be a need for us, and people like us. Being an asshole isn't all bad."

"Just means you have to deal with a lot of shit!" came a brazen call from behind them and the other men in the patrol, who had fallen mostly quiet to eavesdrop on Hughes schooling their green, burst with laughter.

Another added, "Christ, Guerin, if you wanted a soft job, you should have joined the Peace Corps like all those other liberal college pussies."

"Delgado, Crawford," Hughes snapped, the authority in his voice shutting down the mirth at Guerin's expense. "We are not here to kick our heels and shoot the shit. Save your comedy routine for when we're back at base. All of you," he said, turning his focus to include his whole command, "have no reason to slack off. Have you forgotten just this morning we were engaged with an enemy we had no cause to expect? There could be more of them in the woods and just now would have been a perfect time for them to attack. There's no reason why I should have to remind any of you of this fact."

At this, he turned his back on his men and returned to watching the line. The unspoken, but clearly heard, "shut the fuck up and act like the trained men I know you to be" was left hanging in the air, closing mouths, clearing eyes and straightening backs, until all the men took their appointed positions and fell into a watchful silence.

The anxiety that had pooled into Guerin's stomach during the previous gaiety dissipated and he felt grateful, not for the first time, that he was under the immediate command of Hughes. He'd heard plenty of horror stories from other fresh recruits in different commands and didn't think he would have faired as well (though he was forced to admit he wasn't fairing exceptionally well anyway) in another patrol.

Mid-morning passed to noon before another word was spoken. When the quiet of the forest was broken, it came from the two-way strapped to Hughes' shoulder. "Hughes, medical team moving to your location with freed captives. ETA: ten minutes."

"Roger that. You know why the civilians are coming along for the ride?"

"Extensive medical attention is needed for both. We don't have the resources here, so the med team is making an immediate withdrawal to base. Doctor's orders." Hughes could feel the pitch change before the man added, "between you and me." His hand was already at his belt, flicking the volume down on the walkie before all of "you" could be uttered.

The man continued his thought, unaware of the change. "This whole thing is a mess. It's nothing like the other survivor entrenchments. Edwards is about to mutilate the bodies, he's so angry. And Gonzalez is about to strangle him, he's so sick of hearing about how pissed off Edwards is." Hughes forced the urge to smirk down; had anyone been watching, they would have seen a ripple of expression cross his face from left to right, but none would have been able to decipher what emotion it was meant to carry.

"Same old, same old, in other words," Hughes responded dryly, though a touch blandly in an attempt to keep the conversation uninteresting to the others.

The dispatcher had no such qualms and laughed shortly. "Pretty much, yeah. They really have to get around to separating those two. One of them is going to murder the other at this rate." Hughes hummed in agreement.

"That all?"

"Yeah, that's it. Oh, wait, just a head's up: they've had to use restraints on the guy. He's apparently been inflicting injuries on himself since they found him. As if the poor bastard doesn't have enough to deal wi-"

"Roger that," the staff sergeant cut in. "Over and out." At the dispatcher's reluctant return of, "over and out," Hughes returned the volume to its former level, before addressing his men. "You heard Bennett. The medical team will be passing through in a few minutes. The survivors are with them; these are special circumstances, so make sure to keep your distance unless absolutely necessary."

A few minutes later, the three vehicles of the medical convoy appeared on the road, each kicking up more dust than the last. A cloth-topped jeep headed up the pack, carrying with it two soldiers and a frazzled 68W in Scarlet's standard place behind the front passenger seat. Next was the ambulance, the rear doors of which bounced open as it pulled to a stop, revealing the displaced doctor and acting head of the search deployment's medical team. The last in the line was a cloth-covered army truck, suited for carrying large amounts of men or cargo, which Hughes shortly learned was meant to stay with them until the issue of the bodies had been cleaned up.

Scarlet wasted no time in addressing the commanding officer. "Is identification viable?" From having worked these runs with the doctor previously, Hughes knew this was the nearest he'd get to an explicit order to cut the shit and get to the point.

"There must be seventy, eighty bodies in there, Doctor, if not more, all in various stages of decomposition. I can't see it being worth the risk to dig through the pile on the off chance that some of them will be carrying identification."

Scarlet's mouth lifted in a faint attempt at a smile, but fell short, marring her face with a grimace instead. "There are other ways."

"Not really," Fuhs cut in, approaching his commander and the doctor. "The amount of compression over time will have warped any comparable dental work. The most we can get from that are maybe a couple dozen on top, if we're lucky. After that, there's no point trying. Fingerprints are all but gone. Collecting DNA would be equally pointless, as that would only pick up convicted felons. And even then, taking DNA samples from convicts 's not standard procedure here far as I know." The doctor nodded, having already taken this all into account and knowing the futility of her request even as she made it, but approved of the combat medic's observations nonetheless.

"If I may ask, Doctor," Blakely interjected, causing Hughes to move to the side so that his entire patrol could be included in the discussion, "why do we care? Everyone who cares about these people is dead, probably in there with them," the private first class emphasizing his statement with a jerk of his thumb. "We're not giving anyone closure by doing this. Wouldn't it be easier and safer to torch the whole lot of them and move on?"

It was hard to argue such logic – it had been instituted as standard procedure to bag the bodies, move them to a secure location and cremate indiscriminately since they'd started clearing sectors in London. There were simply too many dead to keep an accurate tally, let alone attach names to each body. For the sake of keeping some sort of record, they'd taken to subtracting any survivors from the national census figures and used the new total for estimating the dead; the few handfuls of rescued people made no clear change in the new numbers.

But Scarlet felt her reasons carried a greater weight of importance than simple convenience and logistics and pushed each recovery mission to identify the bodies. She and Hughes had had this conversation several times already and she'd lost every time. It came down to a simple fact: the names of the dead were not worth the safety of the living. The doctor knew this and it weakened her resolve, making her objections easy to overcome.

This time, Scarlet did not have to find an invariably abrupt and awkward way to end the conversation, saved as she was by the appearance of the female survivor.

"Sa-lee-na," the female survivor croaked out, startling all but Guerin, who had watched her wobble out of the ambulance. Her eyes searched the bodies, glimpsing a familiar, though wizen, hand peeking out from behind one of the soldiers. Having found what she sought, she turned her gaze to the attentive, anxious faces and pointed to Selena's body. The private blocking her view turned in alarm, spotted the top-most corpse and, feeling a rush of relief at the knowledge that she wasn't pointing at him, moved hastily to the side.

"Was she Infected?" The girl shook her head and Scarlet was relieved by the small favor. If she was another survivor forced to live in that hellhole, her life couldn't have been good, but at least they could bury her properly. It wasn't much, but it was better than what the dead tended to receive. "Hughes, have your men remove her body from the group. She'll be moved to a separate location and buried."

Hughes didn't bother arguing, knowing any effort he made on his part to contradict the order would only upset the survivor. "Alvarez, Guerin, you heard the doctor. Fuhs, how long?"

The three men approached the body, Fuhs passing the other two latex gloves and snapping on a pair of his own. Everyone had kept well enough back to manage the smell, the wind thankfully blowing away, but Alvarez and Guerin both recoiled when they stepped within the five-foot radius. Fuhs considered all dead rot to be better than any sort of living rot, medical truths be damned, threw a few paper facemasks at the two coughing soldiers and placed a heavy cloth scented with lavender to his own nose and mouth, before considering the body closely.

"Clearly, there's advanced tissue decay, but the weather seems to have-," he stopped and considered his words, acutely aware that his normal candor would be unwelcome at the moment and that 'baked' would hardly be appropriate. "The body is better preserved than most of what we've run into, fresher, put here in a different season than the rest. More dried than rotten. I'd say she's been out here for two months, at the most, but definitely a full month." Fuhs pulled back, his gaze taking in the whole mound and the area around it. "That's strange," he muttered, mostly to himself.

"What's strange?" Alvarez asked, paper mask muffling his voice and hiding the crinkle of disgust on his face. "Should I be backing the fuck up right now?"

"No, not that. Look at this," Fuhs directed, pointing to the body closest to the woman's and then another. "From all the bodies I can see, none show signs of animal scavengers. No bites or tears. They look untouched." Again, Fuhs pointed, this time to the ground around the bodies. "No tracks or scat around the dump site, either. That's not normal. This is a buffet, all set up and ready to go and no takers."

Alvarez rolled his eyes and grabbed Guerin hard on the shoulder, forcing him the remaining two feet forward. "So fucking what? These bodies are diseased. Animals smarter than you give them credit for."

"Sure, sure," Fuhs murmured dismissively, moving out of the way for the other two and continued looking around thoughtfully. He made a note to bring this up with Scarlet later, figuring she already heard his comments to Alvarez and observed the situation herself.

"You take its shoulders," Alvarez ordered, grabbing her pant-clothed ankles and ignoring the easy give of the flesh at the twist of his wrists to a better lifting position. Guerin plunged in, gripping the corpse over the shoulders; his fingers splayed along its upper back and he tugged it up, expecting it to be heavier from the sheer fact of death than it ever possibly could be and almost tipping backwards from the over-exertion.

"Stop fucking around!" Alvarez barked at him, more than done with this grunt labor. "Where you want it, Sergeant?" Hughes looked to Scarlet, who pointed to a spot along the same fence-line as the pile, but clearly separated by a little over ten feet. Task done, Alvarez grumbling and unceremoniously dropping the legs as soon as they reached the spot, Guerin stayed crouched by the body and scrubbed at his hands, latex-gloves creaking. After a moment, he snuck a glance at the girl.

She had clearly not been handling the removal of her friend's body from the dumping ground well. She looked sad and furious and seemed to be trembling slightly, though whether Guerin imagined that or not couldn't be determined. He thought he understood how she felt. He thought he could sympathize.

It seemed so unnecessarily sad, a girl with nothing saying goodbye to someone who clearly meant so much, and not a single thing but tainted memories with which to remember her. Guerin felt the wrongness in his heart, felt himself attached to the woman's pain and could only think that if he could fix this hurt, that she could fix the rest.

The dead woman's finger appeared broken, an awkward, unnatural crook to the middle knuckle set by death, but the wasting of her body made removing the ring easy. Guerin slid the gold band from the woman's finger, passing it once, twice over the fabric of his vest to remove the most obvious dirt, as he walked jerkily towards the young woman and upon reaching her, abruptly thrust the hand holding the ring into her face.

Before either Scarlet or Hughes could intervene on the girl's behalf, the young woman's anger solidified into a solid burst of violence. Guerin's hand snapped back, barely missing his own face, as the ring sprung into the air and landed several yards away, rolling and spinning still further in the dirt, before it rested and was tactfully ignored.

"Not hers," she managed by way of explanation. Suddenly self-conscious, the girl touched her neck, as though reaching for a pendant. Scarlet looked from her bare neck to the dead woman's, the dull shine of a necklace catching her eye. She touched the girl's shoulder with a soft smile, before she moved to the body, and carefully removed the silver cross, not bothering with gloves. Too many days in exposure had weathered the silver to a muted brassy color while dirt and human decay caked the links of the chain.

"We'll get this cleaned up first and get it back to you, okay?" The survivor nodded her understanding, appearing grateful to the woman, and climbed back into the transport vehicle. Scarlet's smile dropped quickly into a furious frown as she pocketed the necklace, glaring hard at Hughes. "A word, Sergeant?"

--

Hannah had wanted to touch Jim, when she finally saw him again, to grab his hand or his wrist and pull herself close like a broken ship beached by the surf, but knew she couldn't. She knew the second she had seen him that this wasn't the Jim she knew and loved – that this was what Jim became after he had eaten away all that he was and to touch him would mean to be eaten away too. Sitting as close together as they were, capable of knocking knees, Hannah slowed her breathing, irrationally feeling that every breath was an invitation to the nothing he exuded to enter her too.

Knowing she should be angry, bitter, resentful and feel nothing but black hatred towards Jim did not change the way Hannah felt. Her anger could not find a place to land now, not with Jim the way he was and all of West's guard dead, and to feel resentful of Jim would be the same as feeling resentful of her father for dying or Selena for giving up. Hannah loved too much, too hard, to let such feelings interfere. She knew there had been reasons behind his actions, had never expected him to be superhuman and that she'd been torn along with the tide because of her own relative weakness in the face of circumstances. No, she didn't blame Jim for what had happened, even though she knew, deep within her bones, she was supposed to.

The ambulance shook as Scarlet slammed the back doors, her irritation making her forgetful of her charges, which earned the closed doors a cross look from the accompanying field medic. Only three medics, including Scarlet, were returning with the convoy to London. The other two were to remain with the deployment and direct the BDB operation. This, Scarlet had explained on their ride to the body pile, meant proper disposal of contaminated cadavers. Hannah suspected, but didn't say, the doctor lapsed into medical conversation when she felt out of her depth.

The ambulance shuddered a second time as Scarlet climbed into the front and slammed the passenger door too. With a shrill cry from the brakes, the vehicle eased into motion and they were again moving away from the compound.

Less than a year ago, Hannah had still been going to school, preparing for her A-levels and cooking dinner for her and her father on the nights he wasn't working, but then the Infection hit and that had all ended. She was no longer concerned with what university she wanted to attend – one nearby to stay close to home or one outside the city, in order to experience what it was like to live in a place where there was more grass than gray – or if Gerard, the goalie for the school football team, would ever ask her on a date after all their flirting. These things were now non-entities and never entered her mind.

Less than a year ago, after infection came and destroyed the city and everywhere else, Hannah had left London with her father and two strangers. As the ambulance turned from the dirt road onto pavement and sped up, Hannah forced herself to look at Jim and not squirm at the total absence of recognition. _He'll need me. He'll get better and he'll need me. _

_He will._

Less than eight months after leaving, Hannah was returning to the city alone.

--

68W: 68 Whiskey – the secondary title for combat medics; RL term in American army. Fuhs is also a 68W, but significantly more experienced and trained than the unnamed medic in Scarlet's support unit.

BDB operation: "Bag, Drag, Burn" operation – the unofficial, but widely used way of referring to corpse disposal (within the context of the story – not a RL detail).


	3. Chapter 2

Note: This is in part thanks to FreeBorn, whose kind review motivated me to finally finish and post another chapter. I hope it was worth the wait.

* * *

**Chapter Two**

"This is where you'll be staying, for your recovery. Once you're physically better, we'll show you around the facility and get you acclimated to the island and how living here works." Hannah nodded, her gaze eager to devour the appearance of the room, so different from what she'd come to expect. The room was nothing like West's compound; it was white and steel and sterile and so high in the air that when she looked out the floor-to-ceiling window, she felt wonderfully dizzy – dizzy in a real way, not the drugged way Selena had used to ease her into life there – and her bed was big enough just for her and she had no intention of sharing it with anyone. Ever, maybe.

Scarlet watched the girl – the fact that she was a teenager made Scarlet see her more like a girl, more like a person prematurely aged – look at the room like it was a miracle come true and felt like a voyeur for having seen it.

The younger woman moved into the room, the tremors in her legs apparently ignored, and touched first her fingertips, then her hand, then pressed her forehead hard into the cool glass of the windows. The mildly fever infused in her complexion seemed to drain away as she gazed out onto the concrete streets far below.

To mask her discomfort, Scarlet abruptly spoke again, "this hospital is converted from an office building. I think this was one of the CEO's offices. It has a nice view. I thought you might like that." Hannah nodded again, not looking at the doctor. The dizziness had shifted suddenly, become unpleasant, overwhelming, and Hannah jerked back from the window abruptly and sat heavily on her temporary bed, closing her eyes.

"I'm tired," she murmured, voice strained from disuse and the rapid revival of grief. For the younger woman's sake, Scarlet pretended to take her words at face value, realizing her presence would be unwelcome for the impending moment she had expected for the last four days.

"That's understandable. Despite being in the ICU for the last few days, you're still moderately malnourished, though no longer dangerously; you should be off the IV by the end of the week and then we can get you back on solid foods. You'll also be on antibiotics to combat the infection we found in your system. They're strong – you shouldn't be on them for more than a day or two. A nurse will be coming in later to clean up the IV entry and put a new one in. She was going to come in now, but I'll tell her to come back in a few hours, after you've rested a bit and had a chance to settle in." At Hannah's third and final nod of their meeting, Scarlet left the room.

Hannah realized, as she lay down in the bed that was hers but not really, her head on the pillow that was hers except mostly not, that after all she'd been through – the death of her mother when she was a child, the infection, the death of her father, her imprisonment and the rapes and Selena dying and Jim turning into just… nothing, being abandoned, however unintentionally, by everyone she'd ever counted on and needed – that her losses should have hurt before. All of what had happened should have hurt before now.

_It's so stupid_, Hannah thought angrily, teeth grinding in the effort needed to not scream under the weight of her pain, tears dampening her borrowed pillow.

And it was stupid.

It was stupid that Hannah didn't have her own clothes.

* * *

The snipers were, by all accounts, doing their job, but it was a job that should not have inspired as many wolf whistles and stifled snickers as it did. That was the problem with Flynn and Doyle being on post together. They were good soldiers, excellent marksmen and watched each other's backs, but their relative assurance of safety and Flynn's tendency to become bored when not in action lead to loud, often inappropriate, behavior. It only became an issue when they were on duty, particularly at night.

Despite the many levels between them, their constant levity had even made it to General Stone's attention. Granted, when it had come to his attention, by the means of a lieutenant who appeared to be misinformed about what warranted the general's consideration, Stone had chewed his ass out and had him removed from his immediate command, but it had, nonetheless, made an impact on the base as a whole.

Most ignored or enjoyed the overheard banter. The few who seemed offended by it tended to be new recruits or those who earned their ranks at peacetime and had yet to experience the reckless use of language that came from having seen extensive battle and bloodshed together. Nonetheless, beyond a few complaints and a handful of half-hearted reprimands, they were trusted to decide for themselves when and where they could get away with the chatter.

It was during one such evening of state-sanctioned peeping and crude commentary that Flynn first became aware of Doyle's fixation on the doctor. It took only one stray comment on her looks for him to realize his partner-in-crime had become suddenly tense and he whiled away the rest of their shared duty by prodding Doyle for details, much to his own personal enjoyment.

Since then, Flynn had always asked, in a pointedly casual way, where the "good doctor" was each night and Doyle, knowing he couldn't hide his obsession from his friend, always told him.

"Medical building, twenty-sixth floor, eighth window over from the right." Stationed on a lower rooftop, Flynn's view was slightly obscured. He could only see four feet into the room before the side of the building cut it off.

Partial though it was, the view was enough to make him whistle low in appreciation. "You're losing your touch. The pretty little thing in the window is most certainly not the doctor." The sigh was clear in Doyle's reply.

"She's further back, near the door. The girl's probably another survivor." Flynn didn't like that assessment, as he didn't much like survivors, especially pretty ones. They were too damaged and skittish to talk to, let alone flirt with. His frown was apparent in his rebuttal.

"She could be a refugee, coming back," he offered. Doyle would have shaken his head had it not required him to stop looking through his scope into the room.

"She wouldn't bother with a refugee," Doyle responded, noticing the way Scarlet shifted her weight from foot to foot and tucked a stray piece of hair behind her ear. She seemed stuck to the wall, even though every shift of her body looked like the next would be a move forward. He heard Flynn hiss over the radio and pried his eyes from Scarlet's face to look at the young woman at the window.

"Maybe she's special. Like she's slow or something." Doyle snorted.

"That would be better?"

Flynn grudgingly agreed that it wouldn't be, "but survivors, most of them are half-crazy. They're no good talking to." Doyle's attention waned as he watched Scarlet leave the room, though he noticed the girl curled up on her bed with her back to the window and seemed to heave and shake. While he knew it was sad, he was too used to seeing people cry alone, as used to it as he was to seeing complete strangers have sex, for it to have an effect. Maybe more so, since the only people having sex tended to be military personnel, and he knew twice as many of them than there were survivors. Everyone cried alone.

He knew Flynn's attention had also left the room, his interest deterred, and Doyle could tell from the darkly amused comment of, "take it all off," that the exhibitionist couple was at it again. More amused than annoyed, he took a moment to scan the rest of the windows on the medical building at the chance that Scarlet had reappear in another room, before taking a look into the residential quarters.

Flynn had a grin in his voice. "They're in rare form tonight."

"You should give them a buzz. Maybe they'll invite you in. Could cross that off your bucket list."

On to other topics and other windows, the snipers failed to notice when the girl in the medical building pushed herself off the bed and trippingly fled her room.

* * *

Everyone has a sense they favor when they feel out the world. Most common are sight and sound, followed closely by touch, perhaps scent, but in many regards, Don was not a common man. His intelligence was skewed ever so slightly so as to make him technically handy, but short sighted and easily swayed by his instinctual mind. Most of his mistakes, and few of his victories, came from his reliance on what the animal in his head urged him to do.

He regretted it, sometimes, but he found he didn't always regret what he thought he was supposed to. Like leaving his wife behind. He didn't regret it. He was sorry for it, but he was certain, in that animal way where doubt was an unknown, that there was no other course of action.

And like the reptile in his mind that he relied so constantly on, Don experienced the world in a way many would consider skewed.

He tasted it.

It was not a sensation he could describe, finding he never learned many words to explain it, not in a culture that relied so heavily on sight and sound, but he did know it was true. To him, sight was dull and flat, sound harsh and unwelcome, but taste – taste was different. It was non-intrusive, but so descriptive.

Don knew the sky was blue, knew it as much as the next man, not because he saw the blue, but because he tasted it– an odd combination of dry desert air and ice-cold water - _blue_. Basic green was not a paint mixture of blue and yellow, but rather chopped lettuce and earwigs, and deep forest green was not the slightest touch of black to an already created color, but pine needles and black beetles. Distinct, but related. And orange - orange tasted nothing like oranges and everything like pus-filled sores and sharp, hot poison.

Don's least favorite color was orange. The boy they had let into their shelter had tasted orange. Sometimes, when he forgot himself, his wife tasted orange and their son – their son tasted like death. Then he would drink something and his wife would be the peppermint he fell in love with and his son would almost disappear, too young to have his own flavor.

But those moments – they scared him. He remembered how relieved he was when his children left for that trip, as he sensed the crowding taste of danger lessen dramatically at their exit. When they were all together, before all he tasted was orange and blood red – the dark taste of fear – and slate gray – Infection -, he coped as best he could by drinking too much, drowning the taste, because they were his family and he loved them.

Not enough to die for them, but enough.

Don was considering how to tell his children about their mother when he tasted a change in the room, a slight give of air that transmitted the flavors of sorrow, madness and solitude across the space of the cafeteria, bland but for the taste of burnt coffee.

A survivor.

Present troubles forgotten, if only for a moment, Don lifted his cup to sip his tea and surreptitiously glance at the newcomer. His first thought was of his daughter, of what it must be like for life to go so incredibly wrong so terribly fast, and he felt vaguely grateful at having been spared at least that much.

He shifted his newspaper, the pages rustling and drawing attention to his presence, and scanned an article he had read many times before. It was a copy of the _New York Times_, from a few months before, when the American president had just announced the plan to deploy troops to the UK. The story was yellowing around the edges, in terms of content and age, Americans telling Americans they're heroes without any actual knowledge of the situation. Though, he had to admit, the Americans had done more to help them than their own government had, and they had just enough cowboy mentality left in them from their pioneer days to feel it was their sacred duty to recolonize an island its own inhabitants had left to shit. Don knew, across the board, that if the Americans would let them, the survivors would be found anywhere but their mother nation.

The air shifted again, the sorrow and solitude and shallow madness all but disappearing as the door slid shut behind the girl. Don looked to the cook, who only shrugged his shoulders before continuing to read through old sports stats.

Well, no matter. New survivors were becoming less and less common, which made them immediate items of gossip. He figured he'd hear about her when he went on shift in the morning.

Speaking of which… Don checked the clock over the swinging doors, confirming it with a glance at his wristwatch. After eleven. Time for bed.

Don stood from his chair while folding the newspaper and waved goodnight on his way out. Sleep would be hard in coming. His children would be there in just two days and he still didn't know how to tell them.


End file.
